snowbird: Yeah, McD, I recall their lambasting the Catholic Church for teaching that the Hamitic people were cursed with blackness.
I lost my post, so here's the short version. Here you go:
But, as we have seen, the Bible says absolutely nothing about the black descendants of these men being cursed! Yet it was incorrectly assumed that they were.... Even up to a hundred years ago the Catholic Church held the view that blacks were cursed by God. Maxwell explains that this view “apparently survived until 1873 when Pope Pius IX attached an indulgence to a prayer for the ‘wretched Ethiopians in Central Africa that almighty God may at length remove the curse of Cham [Ham] from their hearts.’” ...But such teachings have no foundation whatsoever in the Bible. And there were persons in past centuries who showed that the curse uttered by Noah was wrongly being applied to blacks. For example, back in June 1700 Judge Samuel Sewall of Boston explained: “For Canaan is the person cursed three times over, without the mentioning of Cham [Ham]. . . . Whereas the Blackmores [Black race] are not descended of Canaan, but of Cush.”
... What great harm has resulted from the misapplication by churchmen of this Biblical curse! -Awake! Oct 8, 1977
Contrast that with the following gem:
It is generally believed that the curse which Noah pronounced upon Canaan was the origin of the black race. Certain it is that when Noah said, 'Cursed be Canaan, a servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren,' he pictured the future of the Colored race. They have been and are a race of servants, but now in the dawn of the twentieth century, we are all coming to see this matter of service in its true light and to find that the only real joy in life is in serving others; not bossing them. There is no servant in the world as good as a good Colored servant, and the joy that he gets from rendering faithful service is one of the purest joys there is in the world. -The Golden Age, July 24, 1929, p. 702
Not only did the WT criticize the Catholic church for holding the belief until 1873, they said they shoudl have known better because the error was pointed out as early as 1700. Yet the WT held the belief for at least 56 years after the Catholics had abandoned it!
Hypocrisy is too soft a term.